Today was the first workout of Stage 7, the "Final Cut". It calls for a zillion reps of everything, and I suspect I’m going to have to balance my pride with needing to lift light enough to get through the zillion reps. Yes, I can deadlift 150lb; I cannot deadlift 150lb 15 times in a row.

The workout was really, really tough. It started out simply enough, with 2 sets of 8 squats. But then it called for 4 sets of 15-20 of static lunges, pushups, Romanian deadlifts, and bent-over rows. That’s a lot of lifting! It took me a whole hour to finish. Honestly, the only thing that gave me major grief was the lunges. I hate those so much. I hate them so much I had to bribe myself with doing the last set with just bodyweight to get through them. (The first set I did 12.5s in each hand, the second and third 8s, and then that last one was so much nicer.) My right leg is so much weaker than my left, too.

Now I am utterly depleted and not really looking forward to the rest of the day at work. Mostly I just want to curl up in a ball. (I might have tried to do that in the gym a couple times.) I won’t be one bit surprised if I’m having a hard time getting around tomorrow.

2 Responses to Butt, kicked

Good luck! All your NROL4W posts make me want to go back and do that again, since I never got through the program the first time. (Though I really want to stick with stronglifts for now until I make significant strength gains. I have a bad habit of quickly jumping between different programs/plans/whatever- not just workout programs, but pretty much anything I do I get quickly bored doing the same thing, lol.)

I also really hate lunges! I hated doing them in NROL, I could do tons of body weight squats and easily added weight to my barbell squats, but even bodyweight lunges killed me, so it was so hard adding even tiny amounts of weight. (bodyweight lunges have gotten easier for me, current program doesn’t call for weighted lunges though so I only ever do bodyweight as a part of my warmup.)

Thanks! I’m still mixed on NRoL4W, myself; I don’t think it’s a bad program, but I definitely think it’s different from a program like Stronglifts in that it does focus more on appearance and not so much on raw strength. I’ve personally focused on my strength gains after each stage, but I’m not sure if that’s how the plan is intended. It can be a tough sell from a body-positive point of view. (The diet plan doesn’t help.)

Lunges have always always given me grief. I think my hip flexors are ill-suited for them– once I even pulled my hip flexor doing one of the variations. (It made a lovely POP.) Like you, I can squat all the live-long day, though! So weird. One of these days I ought to get a range of motion assessment and sort all that out.